You have to spend money to make money is a business idiom so old that nobody knows who first said it.  Through the years, it’s been so overused and trivialized that it’s lost its meaning.

As general advice, it is pretty obvious.  You need capital to start a business.  You need a product or service to sell if you’re ever going to make a profit.

And sometimes the idea gets taken too far.  Entrepreneurs act like they have to reinvent the wheel and over-invest instead of taking advantage of resources that already exist.  Often things work out better when you save money to make money.

But one place where this idiom is true – particularly in the digital information age – is marketing.

A Definition of Marketing

Marketing is a plan you enact designed to make a specific audience aware of your brand.  Your brand represents the product or service you offer.  Your marketing message communicates the value of that offer.  The audience is a specified group of people who have a need or problem your offer fulfills.

In short, marketing makes the people who will buy your product aware of you and gets them to understand why they need you.

Think of marketing as a bridge.  Your business is on an island, the customers you want to reach are on another island.

The only way you’ll connect is by building a bridge.

Digital Noise

There are a lot of business owners who hesitate to invest in marketing.  They believe natural word of mouth, organic search, and serendipity will eventually make their audience aware of them.

In the past, under certain circumstances, this may have been possible.  Word would get out, people would see the crowd, and wonder what they were missing.  A business could just “take off”.

But today, we have the double-edged sword of digital technology.  One the one hand, it makes building communication bridges easy.  The paths to connecting with your audience have never been so abundant.

On the other hand, it means that there are an awful lot of bridges out there.  People are so inundated with communication that it’s overwhelming.   We live in a world of digital noise that droowns out a lot messages, with promotional/sales messaging suffering more than most.

In other words, building the bridge is only half the battle.  You have to get people to cross it.

Invest in Marketing

There is one word we hear which signals major problems when it comes to marketing today.

That word is “cost”.

How much does all this cost? 

It costs too much.  We just can’t afford this right now.

We just don’t have the money to cover that cost.  

These statements are a de facto surrender.  They’re saying they don’t have the resources to reach their buyers.

Marketing doesn’t belong in the category of  costs.  You don’t buy it, use it as a tool for awhile, then watch it depreciate in value over time.

Marketing is an investment.  Yes, you spend money.  But the reason you do it is to make more money than you spent.

Today, if you don’t invest in marketing, you won’t be able to connect with your audience and make them aware of how you can help them.  If you want to grow and start generating significant revenue from a broader audience, you’ll have to build those bridges.

The return happens when they start crossing them in increasingly large numbers.  Many businesses have an awareness threshold that once crossed, turns into a flood.  Enough people know about you that word spreads on its own.

Thinking of marketing as a cost leads to a vicious cycle.  You don’t have the money to spend on marketing – which you need to bring you the customers that make you more money.

If you think this cycle will be broken by luck or simply time, think again.  Your audience has a powerful computer in their hands that has them juggling hundreds of messages a week.  You have to reach them at just the right moment with just the right message – or they’ll blaze right by you.

If you want to grow, you’ll have to invest in marketing.  Do it right and you can revise the idiom:

You have to spend some money to make a whole lot more of it.